But, I still have the choice to totally ignore it, even if the topic title is in my face.

I think typical human behaviour here is, I see something I don’t like, I ignore it till it goes away. Honestly, I haven’t bothered to unpin the “Welcome to meta.discourse” topic. Not because I haven’t read it, not because I’m not interested, but because I have to make the conscious effort to go in, scroll to the bottom, find the button and click on “Clear pin”.

If it was something I am not interested in I am even less likely to go in and clear that pin unless my whole screen is full up of unpinned notices. Just saying… but I think that’s the typical response. To me it’s like having a banner at the top of the page which tells me I’m the 100000th visitor. It might always be there, but I just expect it to disappear one day.

You’re making it harder for people that want to be pro users of the system.

No amount of blinking text is going to make me open a topic I’m not interested in. That was the joy of having categories in an old-school forum because I can just ignore all of the “READ THIS BEFORE READING ANYTHING ELSE” or “YOU MUST READ THIS, ITS A MUST, A MUST!!!” and just get to the meat in the sandwich. By clicking on a topic I bypass all of the above messages.

What am I losing by ignoring your message? Possibly a slap on the wrist from some pro user. But as a pro user, I have to put up with seeing the same damn message every day. I think you’re inconveniencing the regular user and not the fly-by single poster.

The potential downside of this for me is that it still requires you to reach the end of the topic. Granted, that’s at most only one additional mouse click away, but in cases where the topic is pinned solely for the first post (like the outage notice) this feels like unnecessary effort.

I toyed with the idea of putting an actionable icon in the topic summary, but I don’t know that I like the mock-up:

Hmm, do you really think so? In my experience it’s kind of par for the course for pinned items on other forums, unless they’re also locked (in which case this is a non-issue). The important information will be contained in the original post, and then the rest of the thread typically ends up being random people providing their own commentary.